Funny, I learned about passing xterm a command to execute from your
email. :)

Well that's good to hear. :) The -e switch works with gnome-terminal
too, incidentally.

Remember the our goal is to improve the performance of the Linux
Desktop, not to be correct every single time.

True, being correct every single time doesn't hurt either. :)

It doesn't hurt to be correct. However, I knew some people that got into
a wierd mindset with a perfect 4.0 (out of 4.0) grade point average. The
4.0 grade point became the object rather than learning, they had to
avoid making mistakes and hurting the 4.0.

PS I learned today that gnome actually uses gnome-terminal rather than
xterm.

It does, and it definitely could stand some performance improvements. I
don't think it's _vastly_ slower than xterm (once it's started), but it
does often get in the way.

I think it was Warren who mentioned that he has to minimize
gnome-terminal when he's doing a noisy compile otherwise it
significantly slows down. That's certainly true for me too (although I
just toggle to another tab), but I'm not sure if the real problem is
with gnome-terminal, pango, or the underlying font system -- or perhaps
at layers even lower than that, like really bad or non-existent Render
support in the video driver.

I wrote a cruddy little script call cattest to start up oprofile and cat
the file, then shutdown oprofile. I ran this on the console of a 2.4GHz
p4 machine with 512 MB of memory. The script is attached to this email.
It requires an SMP kernel and needs to be run as root.

After running the little script and installing the debuginfo rpms I was
able to get some profiles. It looks like this particular machine has a
reasonable video card (NVIDIA Quadro 4). Most of the are not for drawing
stuff on the screen.

One drawback is rpm with /usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg does not have an associated
debuginfo rpm. I assume this is where the redendering happens and where
people see the performance hit in gnome-terminal.

The first opreport shows the overall view of which applications had
samples and the shared libraries associated with them. The second
opreport lists the function-by-function breakdown. Why so much 25% of
the time in memchr and real_tolower?

#! /bin/bash
#
# Simple test to gather data on where gnome-terminal spends time
# This is compilicated by the terminal server model of gnome-terminal.
# Using oprofile to get an overall view of what is happening on the system
# This is only going to work with kernel that have oprofile support
# (Red Hat SMP kernels)
OPCONTROL=/usr/bin/opcontrol
RESULTS_FILE=cattime
$OPCONTROL --deinit
$OPCONTROL --reset
$OPCONTROL --setup --no-vmlinux --separate=library
$OPCONTROL --start
/usr/bin/time -o $RESULTS_FILE /bin/cat /home/wcohen/jarg422.txt
$OPCONTROL --dump
$OPCONTROL --shutdown
#Need to do analysis after running the test.